Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Chicago Cubs - Signed Pena

Chicago Cubs - Signed 1B Carlos Pena to a 1-year contract.

It’s hard to call a $10 million salary buying low, but the risk to the Cubs is minimized with a 1-year deal. Pena had about as good a year as a sub-Mendoza line hitter can have, but even so, with most of OPS being BA, his not-unimpressive secondary skills only got him up into below-average territory. BABIP is more of a skill for hitters than it is for pitchers, but even so, Pena’s .222 BABIP is unlikely to be repeated in 2011, which makes a bounceback more likely. Put it this way, the BABIP for pitcher hitting is around .220 and I’d wager a guy with an ISO over 200 is hitting balls harder to field than your average clumsy-batting pitcher.

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Put it this way, the BABIP for pitcher hitting is around .220 and I'd wager a guy with an ISO over 200 is hitting balls harder to field than your average clumsy-batting pitcher.

I can probably figure this out by I'll be lazy and ask instead. Does this not include sacrifice bunts as balls in play converted to outs? I'm assuming not, otherwise I'd expect pitcher BABIP to be lower than this.

Does this not include sacrifice bunts as balls in play converted to outs? I'm assuming not, otherwise I'd expect pitcher BABIP to be lower than this.

Yeah, no sacrifice bunts as it's typically (H-HR)/(AB-HR-SO).

So you really can't expect any normal hitter to have a BABIP worse than the .220 range (it was .227 for 2010) just like we can't really expect any reasonable pitcher to have a true BABIP worse than the .330-.340 range (which is what hitters called in to pitch have put up).

Like Dag Nabbit says, Peña's bad year is partially due to injuries. The other issue he was having is that he was just rolling over everything and doing nothing but grounding out into the shift. His FB and LD percentages were way down because of this, which is why his BABIP was so low. I imagine that he developed some kind of mechanical flaw in his swing or timing, which should be correctable.